What should brand guidelines include?
What brand guidelines should cover, from logo rules and colour codes to voice and templates, how long they should run and how to keep a team using them.
What are brand guidelines for?
Brand guidelines let people outside the design team apply your brand without asking a designer. Staff, printers, developers and agencies can look up the right logo file, colour code or tone for the job, so a poster made by a printer matches a website built by a developer.
The designers who built an identity carry many of its decisions in their heads. Guidelines write those decisions down, so they still hold when a designer leaves, you change agency or a printer in another city opens the file.
Guidelines document an identity that already exists. If you’re still working out what that identity should contain, start with how a logo differs from a brand identity.
What visual rules should they cover?
Brand guidelines should cover six visual areas: the logo, colour, typography, imagery, iconography and motion. Each area needs the details people would otherwise guess, such as exact colour codes and the smallest size the logo can print at. Show examples of right and wrong use for each.
| Section | What it should cover |
|---|---|
| Logo | Every version of the logo and when to use it; clear space; minimum sizes for print and screen; examples of misuse, such as stretching or recolouring. |
| Colour | Codes for screen and print; how much of each colour to use. |
| Typography | The fonts; a hierarchy of sizes and weights for headings, body text and captions. |
| Imagery | A brief for photography and illustration that covers subjects and style. |
| Iconography | The icon style; when to use icons. |
| Motion | How the logo and other elements move on screen. |
Our guidelines for Happy My Tour, a travel booking platform, take the logo down to its smallest use. Beside colourways, minimum sizes and placement rules, they include round favicons for the browser tab, where the full badge and wordmark would be too small to read.
Shopify’s guide to brand guidelines describes a brand guide for Heyday Canning Co. with “examples of unapproved uses and an explanation of what’s wrong with each example”. Label each wrong example with the reason it’s wrong, so a designer can spot the same mistake in cases the guidelines don’t show.
What should they say about voice and messaging?
Brand guidelines should set out the brand story, the personality, the tone of voice and the key copy people reuse, such as boilerplates. Without them, each writer describes the business in their own words, and a sales email and a support reply can read as if two companies sent them.
A boilerplate is the standard paragraph about your company that ends a press release or sits on a partner’s website. Key copy covers the other lines people reach for most, such as the tagline and a one-sentence description of what you do.
Write the tone of voice as instructions for particular moments in a customer’s journey. Happy My Tour’s guidelines, for example, ask for a reassuring voice while travellers are still weighing up their options and a direct one once they’ve decided to book.
Voice is harder to check than a colour code, so show the same message written on brand and off brand.
Which templates should come with them?
Brand guidelines should come with templates for the pieces your team makes most often, such as social posts, ads, stationery and presentation decks. Templates keep day-to-day work on brand, because staff start from a file with the logo, colours and type already in place and change only the words and pictures.
Templates cover only the formats someone planned for. When the brand meets a new channel, such as a new social platform or an event stand, it needs a new template, and until one exists people improvise from the nearest old file.
How long should brand guidelines be?
Brand guidelines should be long enough to cover the whole system and short enough that people open them. The right length depends on how many parts the brand has and how many people apply it, so a founder’s starter kit runs far shorter than guidelines for a company with several teams.
The guidelines book for the Happy My Tour brand system runs to 38 pages and covers the brand story and voice as well as the logo, type, colour and photography.
A brand sprint ends with a starter brand kit. It suits a young company where few people apply the brand, and you’ll need to extend it into full guidelines once more teams start making things for it.
Guidelines that are too short leave gaps people fill with their own choices, and guidelines that are too long stop being looked up.
How do you keep a team using them?
Name one person who owns the guidelines, keep them with every brand file where the whole team can find them and walk new staff through them. Update the guidelines whenever the brand starts appearing somewhere new, so nobody has to make up answers the guidelines should already give.
The owner answers questions, approves exceptions and decides when something new belongs in the guidelines. Without an owner, the guidelines drift away from what the team makes.
Our asset library handover puts the guidelines, logo files and templates in one place, so nobody pulls an old logo from an email thread. Team onboarding is part of our rebrand and rollout engagement; with a sprint or an identity, ask for it in the scope or plan for your guidelines owner to run it. Our branding services compare what each engagement includes.
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Yes. Our brand identity engagement includes guidelines and templates.
Yes. Guidelines and systems can be scoped on their own, so we can document an existing identity and add the templates your team needs.
Yes. A new template or section is quoted at a fixed fee before work starts, like any change request.
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